Abstract

In recent years, more and more researchers devoted to identifying community structure in social networks. The characteristics of the social network are analyzed by clustering the social network users according to user’s relationships. However, the users of current popular social networks such as LiveJournal and Flickr, can join to or create the communities according to their interests. Instead of grouping the users according to the cluster strategies which are wildly used in previous works, the purpose of the paper is to explore the structures and characteristics of the social networks according to the community the users actually joined. Moreover, we experiment on four real datasets, LiveJournal, Flickr, Orkut and Youtube, to analyze the characteristics hidden behind the social networks.